Jesse Ventura defamation suit: Sniping continues

Chris Kyle, left, a former Navy SEAL and author of the book "American Sniper," and former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura. (AP Photo/File)

Although a federal judge told the two sides in Jesse Ventura's defamation suit to quit "sniping" at each other in their pretrial filings, they appear to be at it again.

Lawyers for the former Minnesota governor filed a motion asking the judge to make defendant Taya Kyle sit for a second deposition because she refused to answer many questions at her first one -- and they want her to pay their expenses.

The motion was filed Wednesday. Later that day, lawyers for Kyle, widow of Navy SEAL-turned-bestselling-author Chris Kyle, filed a motion demanding Ventura hand over military service records that a judge had ordered him to cough up nearly a year ago.

John Borger, a lawyer for Taya Kyle, wrote that he wants to see "any documents confirming Ventura's alleged assignment to the Naval Special Forces SEAL Team 1 Reserve status from December 1973 to September 1975."

Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan set an Oct. 16 hearing on the dueling motions.

Ventura, a former professional wrestler, sued Chris Kyle last year over a passage Kyle included in his best-selling memoir, "American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History."

Kyle wrote that he decked a guy he called "Scruff Face" for being mouthy and disrespectful in a California bar in 2006. After the book came out, Kyle said in interviews that Ventura was the man he punched.

Advertisement

Ventura says the incident never happened.

The former governor sued for defamation. But in February, Kyle and a friend were killed in Texas; a former Marine said to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder awaits trial in the killings. Kyle's widow was substituted as the defendant in the defamation case after she became executor of her late husband's estate.

At times, the lawyers' filings have been acerbic, even mocking. At a hearing Sept. 25, U.S. District Judge Richard Kyle, who will preside over the trial next May, chastised the lawyers for injecting invective into their legal writings.

At the hearing, Ventura's attorney David Bradley Olsen told Kyle he was unsatisfied with Taya Kyle's refusal to answer questions during her Sept. 11 deposition in Fort Worth. He said he planned to file a motion to compel her to sit for another one.

That was the motion filed Wednesday. In it, Ventura lawyer Court Anderson complained that "in the absence of any instruction from her counsel, Ms. Kyle selectively chose the questions she was willing to answer, and repeatedly refused to answer others."

Anderson also said the woman's lawyer "repeatedly and improperly instructed Ms. Kyle not to answer deposition questions based on a spousal privilege that does not apply."

Ventura's lawyers want the judge to appoint a "special master" to make sure the woman cooperates during the deposition.

The lawyer also criticized the widow for comments she has made in appearances on national TV and radio.

He complained that she had told Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck in interviews that Ventura sought to take money from her and her two children. Anderson said the publisher's insurer pays Taya Kyle's lawyers.

The lawyer claimed that Kyle "regularly told ... tall tales intended to make himself look like a hero."

The author of a profile of Kyle published this year by Dallas-based D Magazine has written that Kyle claimed to have shot and killed two men who tried to rob him and steal his pickup. So far, no evidence has surfaced to prove the incident happened.

Another former SEAL-turned-author, Marcus Luttrell, gave a detailed account of the alleged incident in his 2012 book, "Service: A Navy SEAL at War."

Anderson said that this story wasn't Kyle's only questionable tale.

"Chris Kyle told one reporter, for example, that during Hurricane Katrina he ... was sent to New Orleans where, from the top of the Superdome, he and other snipers shot and killed dozens of looters during the riots," the lawyer wrote.

Kyle also allegedly told people that once, while in a luxury suite with friends at a University of Texas football game, he had choked a former UT football player into unconsciousness because the player "had fooled around with his friend's girlfriend."

"As with Chris Kyle's story about Ventura, however, there is no evidence that any of the other hero stories he regularly told are true either: no arrests, no police reports, no coroner reports, no hospital records, no surveillance video, no news reports, etc.," the legal memo says.

Ventura served in the Navy's Underwater Demolition Teams, or UDTs, a special warfare group. The UDTs were later merged into the Sea, Air and Land special warfare group, known as SEALs.

In September 2012, Kyle's lawyers asked Ventura for "all documents confirming the nature and dates" of Ventura's time in the Navy. A judge signed an order granting the request.

Borger wrote that four days after the judge's order, Ventura provided a few pages of documents to Kyle.

"The only military record within those documents was ... marked 'confidential' and consisting of a one-page record of discharge effective Dec. 10, 1973," the lawyer wrote. "As noted above, Ventura has claimed military service after that date."

Borger said that he asked Ventura's lawyers about it but got no response. Borger noted the failure to reply in at least three subsequent emails or filings, he said.

"To date ... plaintiff has not provided any further record of his military service, including any actual SEAL service," Borger wrote.